Seems like a vanity metric to sum all the offers, which can't be simultaneously satisfied. instead of keeping separate the counts amd something like average or max per company or candidate.
I agree, yet I have never heard this technique to describe other auctions. For instance, any time a ridiculous item is for sale on Ebay, the news stories describe the top bid and the number of bidders.
Perhaps the actual sum of the max bids for all 88 developers would be less misleading.
The sum of max bids would indeed be far less misleading. I am almost positive that that sum divided by 88 to show the average real offer yields an extremely unimpressive figure, which is the sole reason why they went with this other method.
I agree. This could be 33 low ball $1 million offers for a single guy who is a VP of engineering at Facebook. Without a histogram or something better than this metric, we can't tell.